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Arsenal leapfrogged their Champions League rivals by defeating Newcastle by two goals to nil courtesy of Aaron Ramsey and Alexandre Lacazette strikes. The Gunners are third on the Premier League table with 63 points - the total number of points they accrued last season under Arsene Wenger.
They have now won 10 consecutive home games for the first time since the 1997/98 season. This was indeed a vintage performance from the gunners, keeping a third consecutive clean sheet at home this season in all competitions and scoring goals, and striker Alexandre Lacazette stressed that Unai Emery emphasized this during his team talk during the game:-
It was a big game tonight. We knew it was going to be a tough game but we listened to the coach. He said we had to be patient and efficient in the two boxes. We did that today.
However, there are a number of things we observed during the game. Let's take a look at some of them.
#1. Arsenal's high pressing game
Unai Emery wants his team to press the opposition with high pressing and also the desire to quickly win the ball back quickly when they lose it.
This was evident all through the team for 90 minutes as they were seen harrying the opposition players off the ball, giving them little time and space on the ball, something that Raphael Benitez team struggled to cope with.
The defenders were close to the Newcastle attackers such that even when the ball breaks forward for a counter attack for Newcastle, there was always one player for Arsenal to snuff out the danger. The likes of Nacho Monreal, Sokratis Papasthopoulos and even Shkodran Mustafi did to good effect,
#2. Arsenal are adapting to teams who play very deep
In times past, especially under Arsene Wenger, the gunners often come unstuck when they face opposition who are just contented with sitting back to defend deep and waiting for their moments to counter-attack.
From the blast of the whistle, it was obvious that was their intent. The likes of Ayoze Perez, Salomon Rondon, and Miguel Almiron were pressing the gunners from the front and leaving very deep other players to do the defending and leaving very little space for the gunners to capitalize on.
In the first half, because of the absence of Granit Xhaka, we did not see too much of those long balls over the top to stretch the opposition backline, but Aaron Ramsey tried that on a couple of occasions as well as Shkodran Mustafi.
Unai Emery has also taught his team to express themselves with dribbling runs into the 18- yard box with an emphasis on combination play to break down the opposition which we saw with Mesut Ozil and Alexandre Lacazette and Lacazette and Aubameyang for the second goal.
